After a whole week of not blogging, the least I can do is post a photo for Random Photo Friday.

This is one of my sisters, down on the farm, bringing some style to the tractor.

'Cause that's how we roll 'round these parts. Style, substance, and a handful of dirt tossed on in there for good measure.

And now, on this gorgeous September weekend, I'll leave you with this, one of my favorite passages from poet Mary Oliver:

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.I do know how to pay attention, how to fall downinto the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,which is what I have been doing all day.

- Mary Oliver

Here's to fields, and to strolling, and most of all: to paying attention.

Just a phase she went through, you said to yourself, with a shake of your head.

Didn't 'cha?

But what day is it today? And what do you see here?

Yeah, baby: not one but TWO photos to gently nudge you into your weekend.

That'll learn ya.

This is my mom, holding 3 eggs plucked straight from the nest of hay where they were laid. She sells them by the dozen to a few damn lucky select customers.

"I'm thinking I might have to raise my price," she said to me recently.

"Oh? How much are you charging now?" I asked.

"$2.00 a dozen. But I'm thinking I may have to increase it to $2.25."

TWO DOLLARS A DOZEN? I could practically buy a plane ticket, fetch the eggs, grab a cup of Stumptown on my way out and still come out ahead.

This is one of 4 pigs my parents are raising this year.

They eat zucchini + pea shoots + whatever is left over from the garden. My dad drives to a local upscale market twice a week and picks up all of the past-dated artisan bread and cuts it up in chunks to feed them in the evenings. (Psst, Barbara: perhaps you might entertain the notion of getting a pig? They help nicely with the issue you raised.)

Their date with the butcher arrives next week, and my mother tells me that they've sold all the meat already - I couldn't even bring myself to ask how much they charged.

There are still good deals left in the world. You just might have to head to North Plains, Oregon to find them.

My life is full of small shining moments, glimmering threads sewn into the fabric of each day. They happen all the time: catching sight of a full moon overhead; lingering over tea with friends; sinking into a good book. Alone, they might not seem significant, but together, they provide solid proof of life’s goodness, of the everyday magic that surrounds me.

But there are moments, and there are Moments. Moments when planning + intention + luck slide magically into place and everything is right with the world, if only for a few shimmering seconds. Such are the moments that make up the Highlight Reel.

The Highlight Reel is what I draw from when grim reality begins to cloud my vision, when all I can see is lack and loss. It spins like a slow-moving carousel, filled with slow-mo shots of golden light, triumphant eyes, exultant smiles. It's my happy place.

In July, I had not one but two moments for the Reel.

They both happened on the occasion of my mother’s 60th birthday. Prior to the big day, my sisters and I talked for months about how to commemorate this special occasion. What would bring our mother the most happiness? We gently probed her for suggestions, and came away with a few guidelines: no big party. No la-dee-da.

Finally, we decided upon this: all of us girls, her daughters (there are six of us) would whisk her away to her favorite place, Canon Beach, where we would spend the day. We would also invite her sister, our aunt, to join us. I would fly up from San Francisco; youngest sister would fly up from Austin, baby in tow, and we’d spend the day showering our mother with love. And we wouldn't tell her beforehand; we'd make it a secret.

It wasn’t a showy plan, and there was much debate among us as to whether it was enough, but we stuck to it. Our aunt arranged to spend the day with our mother, thereby guaranteeing that her day would be free. I flew in the night before, as did little sister, whose plane was delayed twice, and who finally straggled into PDX after midnight carrying one exhausted infant.

On the morning of our mother's birthday, we sisters met about a mile from the farm so that we could drive down the hill, caravan-style, for the surprise. Each of us had called her earlier that morning, telling her in our own ways that we wished we could spend the day with her, but that one thing or another had prevented it. “How’s the weather in San Francisco?” she asked me. “Cool and foggy as always,” I replied, looking out on a sunny Portland sky.

After we moved to the farm when I was ten, I felt like my world collapsed inward.

No more going to school - now school was held at the kitchen table, with #2 pencils and textbooks from Alpha & Omega and A Beka. No more piano lessons from the nice lady in the trailer house - now I walked up the road to take piano lessons from the neighbor girl. No more spending the afternoons with friends or going to sleep-over. Now there were diapers to change, diapers to wash. Sticky toddler hands to wipe and cherries to can. Chickens to feed and goats to milk. Zucchini and pole beans to weed and water.

We were only 23 miles from Portland, 4.5 miles from the grocery store, but it seemed to me that we might as well have existed in our own universe.

And then: my father got a job working as a building engineer in downtown Portland. He left before dawn and returned in the early evening, upon which he would change his clothes and head back outside to work in the barn, or add another section of fence, or chop branches for the wood pile.

One Saturday morning, he announced that he was going into his office for a few hours.

"Can I go?" I asked.

He studied me for a moment. "Well," he said, finally. "I suppose you might like to see a bit of Portland."

Today, on Earth Day, I find myself thinking about garbage. About how much garbage I create, how long it lasts, and what my garbage says about me.

I didn't think about garbage until my family moved into the farmhouse. Prior to the move, we lived in the suburbs, where garbage trucks drove by one day a week and picked up the trash. It was so simple; you put your garbage in a can and wheeled the can to the curb, and it magically disappeared.

When we moved to the farm, there was no more can. No more truck. No more magic.

Instead, we had The Pit.

Before we bought the farmhouse, we rented it. The people we rented it from had dug a deep hole in the ground a few yards from our house; a couple of times a week, they drove over with their garbage sacks and threw everything inside. The Pit horrified my parents. My father, the scientist, knew that things didn’t stay inside of a hole forever; they leached out into the soil and contaminated the ground.

We children were fascinated and repelled by The Pit; we would walk
within a few feet of it and try to catch a glimpse of the rat family who lived on the brim. It had a sweet-sour stench on hot days. When people came to visit us, we went to tremendous lengths to keep them away from that side of the house. It was a source of silent shame.

As a result, we became rather obsessive about our garbage. We used multiple bins to sort it out: glass, paper, tin. Food scraps of every kind went to the animals; paper garbage was burned. Tin was flattened, and glass was reused. We tried very hard not to throw things away.

When we finally bought the farmhouse and covered over The Pit, we all breathed a sigh of relief, but we knew: it was still there. Moving, breathing, breaking down. It didn’t go away.

Now that I’m back in a place where the garbage truck comes to pick up the can once a week, I sometimes forget about The Garbage Problem. Then I read an article like the one in the January ’08 edition of National Geographic that shows a warehouse filled with discarded plastic computer monitors, and a photograph of a man in New Delhi pouring molten lead smelted from circuit boards from one pan into another. The caption reads: “His family uses the same pots for cooking.”

Talk about a buzz kill.

What was it I thought I had to have? A new cell phone? A faster laptop? It can wait.

Tea wrote a moving post on Tuesday about how she feels uncomfortable writing about food amid a worldwide food crisis; like the Food Issue, the garbage problem is deeply sobering. Just as my family knew that The Pit would affect our tiny little ecosystem, all of us instinctively understand that our garbage doesn’t magically disappear.

I know this. You know this. But writing about it and talking about it is a bummer; we'd all rather think about something else, like ice cream. Or chocolate.

But somehow, acknowledging the garbage - talking about it, smelling it, watching the rats scurry over it - is strangely liberating.

I'd rather live in a world where the nasty, smelly stuff is talked about. Hidden, it is toxic. Hidden, it seeps into waterways + dinner plates + arteries and rots us from the inside out.

This is what I had for lunch today: crisp-tart slices of Pink Lady apples, hunks of Tillamook Extra Sharp Cheddar, and a handful of toasted almonds.

For a simple spread with no cooking involved, it made me unreasonably happy.

It had to be the cheese.

I haven't eaten Tillamook cheese in a long while, but one bite whisked me back to Oregon, and the occasional afternoon my family spent together in our brown Ford station wagon, packed bony-elbow-to-bony -knee like crabs in a pot, hurtling down the road away from the farm and towards the craggy, foggy, stunningly beautiful Oregon coast.

Until you've been a farm kid with dirt-packed fingernails and sneakers flecked with chicken poo, you can't imagine how exciting it was to get away from the drudgery of pinning wet clothes to the clothesline and hoeing the garden for a few hours. Especially when our destination was one of the most wonderful places on earth: the Tillamook Cheese Factory.

It took forty-five minutes to get from our house to Tillamook, and we spent the time singing hymns and pinching each other stealthily as the wagon rolled by fields and barns and thick stretches of fir trees. By the time we arrived - rumpled, crumpled, and snarling - we couldn't wait to escape the Gran Torino and run across the vast parking lot towards the huge white factory.

Last week, as I was sorting through an old box of stuff, I came across this picture of my mother, circa 1972. Isn’t she a hottie?

Not that she would want me to say that. She blushes easily, my mom. She doesn’t like the spotlight; she listens more than she talks. She is a woman of strong convictions, but she holds them quietly. More than twenty years ago, she was already passionate about natural foods, and believed that organic was the only way to go. When people challenged her on this, she blushed all the way to the roots of her glossy brown hair, but she stood her ground.

Her early influences were Adelle Davis, Frances Moore Lappé (Diet for a Small Planet was a bit hit in our house) and Sugar Blues by William Dufty. She joined the first Rodale Book Club, and read each month's shipment before she carefully wrapped it up and sent it back. She read everything on nutrition and health that she could get her hands on, and she sought out people with "alternative" ideas. We didn't have health insurance, but we did have cod liver oil and raw garlic and all the vegetables we could eat, thanks to my mother.

I’ll never forget riding across the countryside with her and watching her point out a crop duster hovering over the fields. “Roll up the windows," she said tersely. "He’s spraying deadly poisons all over the ground." Her voice was grave. “People are going to eat that food.” We all felt the gravity of what was taking place right in front of our eyes. “What do you think will happen to that man?” she asked us. “He’s breathing in all of those fumes. Do you think his lungs will suffer?”